Technology and Culture

abstract:

Hearing aids facilitated musical listening in postwar Japan in two distinctive ways. First, hearing aid developers and their associates in deaf education used assistive technologies to play music, thus promoting a new mode of listening that in their view would enhance deaf people's lives. Second, some developers sought to expand into general consumer music hardware, with Japanese and American sources marginalizing the hearing aid's role in postwar domestic electronics development. Hearing aid manufacturers formed multilateral, sociotechnical coalitions, cultivating what could be called a "regime of rhythm" form of listening: it emphasized the personal, transformative potential of music. Arguably that regime of rhythm was deeply intertwined in hearing aid manufacturers' public outreach campaigns, pedagogical practices at schools for the deaf, and consumer sound hardware, to promote the perceived maximum use of people's sensory abilities through listening to music.